Tag Archives | Objectivism

A Reader’s Guide to Atlas Shrugged, Part 11 Spoiler Alert: You do not need a reader’s guide to Atlas Shrugged—at least not for your first reading. Ayn Rand’s novel is clear, compelling, eminently readable, and perfectly comprehensible on its own terms. Yet Atlas is also a rich and complex novel, with an intricate plot in […]

The Objectivist corners of the Internet have been lit up recently by some new comments from Yaron Brook (executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute) about the Second Amendment and gun control. I’m not going to take on these comments in much detail because they strike me as offhand, flippant, and offensively arrogant—you really have […]

An Interview with Blake Scholl of Boom Technology Supersonic flight is both a technology of the future and a technology of the past. The sound barrier was first broken in 1947, and the Concorde started offering supersonic passenger flights in 1976. But the Concorde was mothballed in 2003, ending the era of commercial supersonic flight—for […]

The most ridiculous part of the Super Bowl’s halftime show—more ridiculous than Lady Gaga’s actual music or even her choreography, which is saying something—was the Tiffany and Co. ad in which she proclaimed her great creativity and nonconformity. Because nothing says “anti-establishment” like a millionaire pop star shilling for Tiffany. She says things like, “I […]

Did you know that the incoming Trump administration is an Objectivist conspiracy intended to install a cabal of Ayn Rand “acolytes” at the highest levels of the United States government? Neither did I, and I actually am an Objectivist. So you can imagine my excitement at reading a somewhat hysterical warning from the Washington Post […]

If it sometimes seems like it’s impossible to restore the free market, as if every new wave of government regulation is irreversible, then consider that one form of regulation, which is common in the most dogmatically big-government enclaves in the country, is being pretty much completely dismantled before our eyes. And it’s the hippest thing […]

In The Federalist, Hunter Baker recently argued that conservatives should approach the ideas of Ayn Rand with a little more “Christian charity,” and that they should reverse the attempt by William F. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers, decades ago, to drum Ayn Rand out of the right. I have a few quibbles with this piece, but […]

Objectivists get used to hearing something like this every once in a while, so it didn’t surprise me when I read the following in an article by a conservative colleague: The number of true individualists is still relatively small…. If you buy or sell things, consume popular culture, or have anyone in your life you […]

I recently published a commentary on how certain basic ideas about how to organize the Objectivist movement that were formulated in the 1980s have begun to fall away, implicitly rejected even by those who used to advocate them. Of those ideas, the only one on which I have seen any real debate is the question […]

In recent years, for reasons I have explained at length before, I have separated myself from the formal Objectivist movement and its occasional soap operas—though not, of course, from the philosophy of Objectivism itself, which happily survives independent of the various characters who associate themselves with it. So it is with some reluctance that I […]